Dawoud BeyThe Birmingham Project

1 May to 28 June 2014
745 Fifth Avenue

On 1 May 2014, Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Fifth Avenue location an exhibition
of photographs by DAWOUD BEY from his series The Birmingham Project.

The Birmingham Project is a response to the tragic events of the Civil Rights Movement
that unfolded on Sunday, 15 September 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. That morning, a
time-delay bomb planted by a Ku Klux Klan group at the Sixteenth Street Baptist church
exploded, killing four young girls. In the racial strife that ensued, two teenage boys
were also killed.

Beginning in 2005, Dawoud Bey made periodic visits to Birmingham with the idea to
commemorate this history through his work. As the fiftieth anniversary of the violence
approached, an invitation from the Birmingham Museum of Art provided the catalyst for
Bey to realize this project.

Over a period of five months at two locations in Birmingham – the Museum and the
Bethel Baptist Church, a site of earlier segregationist attacks – Bey took photographs
that he would use to produce this series of large-scale portraits of present-day
residents. His subjects are children of the same age as the victims and adults fifty years
older, the age the deceased should have reached. Each squarely faces the camera.
With a symmetry of background and gesture, the images are paired into diptychs that
conflate the present with the past and evoke wrenching loss and unrealized hopes while
posing a challenge for the future.

Also on view is 9.15.63, a single-channel video Bey shot in Birmingham. Devoid of
human presence and also following a diptych format, the video is a meditation on that
early Sunday morning. The left camera observes charged social spaces for the black
community momentarily defused by their stillness: a beauty parlor, barbershop, lunch
counter and school classroom. On the right, images of blue sky, trees, and rooftops roll
by as if glimpsed by a child through the window of a car.

Additional works from Dawoud Bey’s The Birmingham Project are currently on view in
the Whitney Museum of American Art 2014 Biennial Exhibition. The Mary Boone Gallery
exhibition, at 745 Fifth Avenue, will remain on view through 28 June 2014.